February 29, 2012
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Amsterdam, Netherlands
Next week Friday, Günter and I will fly to Madrid, Spain, where we will spend a long weekend celebrating the fact that we met each other fifteen years ago. It was in a small gay bar call Gaiety, near Munt, where I met him all those years ago, and despite the fact that the bar not long after, our friendship continued. A couple of months after we met each other, Günter became my first flat mate on Amstelkade when he moved into the spare bedroom. Not too long after that, at the end of July 1997, we went on holiday together – a week in Sitges, Tossa de Mar and Barcelona – all in north east Spain. Three rolls of film (slides) were shot during that holiday, the old-fashioned way with analogue cameras.
Tonight, all these years later, Günter came over to my place (no longer Amstelkade of course) for our usual pizza-wine-chatting evening, when we got to talk about that holiday in 1997, which was also the first time I had flown again since 1979 (I know, I have caught up in the meantime.) “I still must have those slides somewhere,” I said to Günter as I opened the big red box that also server as my dining room table. It is filled to capacity with slides and photographs, so finding those particular slides would be quite a challenge… but sometimes you just need to be lucky. The very first set of slides in the first, randomly picked box, that I picked turned out the be the one from our Spain holiday. Next step was the slide projector… Now, I knew that I had moved it with me to Oude Hoogstraat, but where was it? It turned out to be in the storage room down the hallway. I unpacked it and gingerly I plugged it into the electricity socket, half expecting it to go ‘boooof!’ before dying altogether. Nothing happened. Light switch on… and there was the light! It was still working! I took a clock and the map of Scotland from the wall and moved the TV out of the way, and before we knew it, there were our memories of Spain 1997, projected on my white living room wall! It was great to see those pictures again! We had a great time reliving memories. The slide in the above picture shows Günter overlooking Sitges bay. Ah… to be young again…
